One commonly cited benefit of the Electoral College is that, even when the national popular vote for president is close, it creates a decisive victory for one candidate or the other. However, these "decisive" victories are often more tenuous than they seem. There are plenty of elections in which slight vote shifts in key states would have changed the winner of the Electoral College vote.

Academy Award nomination voting began Thursday, January 5, and runs through Friday, January 13. By using ranked choice voting, the Academy allows a variety of nominees to be considered--from blockbuster hits, to independent films.

San Francisco started using ranked choice voting in 2004. Since then, four Bay Area cities have held 138 elections for the 53 offices elected in those cities. In every single instance, the winner of the election has been the candidate who would defeat all others in a head-to-head contest -- that is, “the Condorcet winner.”

There will be a new experiment in divided government. The Connecticut State Senate is now perfectly tied 18-18 for the first time since 1893. It is too early now to know what sort of concessions Democrats may offer. However, FairVote’s guide to Collaborative Policy Making could serve as a road map for inclusive policy making in the state Senate. Connecticut currently uses none of the agenda setting and consensus building practices that lead to a more civil and functional divided government.

Looking forward, American politics is at a tipping point. Our current system simply isn’t working, and all trends suggest it will keep getting worse. Maine shows that voters are ready for change, and reformers are planning city and state campaigns for RCV across the nation. Now is the time to think big – and rank the vote.

Last week, Real Clear Politics extrapolated demographic trends to project which states are likely to gain or lose U.S. House seats in the reapportionment that will occur after the 2020 Census. Their forecast has nine states losing one U.S. House seat and six states gaining seats. These are only projections, but given that we are now six years into the decade, many of the demographic shifts of the decade are already well advanced and difficult to reverse.

Four Bay Area cities, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Leandro, elect their mayors and a total of 52 offices with ranked choice voting (RCV). Each city has now elected all of those offices at least twice since San Francisco started using RCV in 2004 and the remaining cities in 2010.

Two days before Thanksgiving 2016, a three-judge panel struck down partisan gerrymandering as unconstitutional in a challenge to Wisconsin’s state legislative redistricting plan. If the Court sides with the plaintiffs and strikes down partisan gerrymandering, it will be important – but it will not be as world-changing as some are claiming.

Ranked choice voting (RCV, also called instant runoff voting) is a proven way to open up elections to give voters more voice and greater choice. Yet there is a persistent group of online critics who espouse other voting methods and attribute to them a range of untested virtues. Our concerns focus on viability and workability.